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The Hippo Roller - A brilliant way to push water

Updated: Jun 21, 2013, 16:32 IST

The Hippo Roller - a brilliant way to push water, instead of carrying it, thereby saving millions of women and children in the developing world the neck-crushing, time-consuming, labour of transporting their daily supply. The drums can carry more water than the traditional buckets carried on the head, are made of incredibly resilient plastic, and are easy to push even over very difficult terrain. Simple and revolutionary.More than 20 years ago, an engineer and senior designer dreamed up a solution to help people in rural areas carry out the exhausting, time-consuming and essential task of bringing home water from nearby rivers and community taps. This basic chore, typically done by women and girls, occupies an estimated 200 million hours per day globally, time that could be better spent on other tasks or, in the case of children, in school.Pettie Petzer and Johan Jonker, both South Africans, decided to tackle this social issue by coming up with a better water bucket. First, they used the technique of rotational moulding to produce seamless and durable plastic water drums. Their real breakthrough, however, came from the decision to turn the water drum into a wheel, almost like wheelbarrow, with steel handles attached to its sides.And so the Hippo water roller was born. Its name came from a survey in South Africa, where passers-by were asked what they thought of the product. They said it looked "big" and "strong:" "just like a hippo". The plastic drum, which can be easily pushed or pulled, has a capacity of 90 litres, or 24 gallons. This is about five times more than a woman can carry on her head in a bucket. "We were ambitious," said Petzer. "We saw the potential of the project for water access in Africa."Design awards followed. The distinctly shaped plastic drum is made from high quality material; depending on the conditions, the hippo water roller usually lasts five to seven years. But the Hippo water roller failed to break onto the market. Grant Gibbs, also from South Africa, who was involved in selling it on a small scale, decided to quit his IT job in 1994 and take up the baton as full-time project leader. Despite a slow start, he remained doggedly determined, inspired by how the Hippo water roller was being put to use at the community level.Today the hippo roller can be found in 21 African countries. According to the website of the Hippo Water Roller Project, a total of 44,000 rollers have been distributed, impacting more than 300,000 lives. In a 2012 study for the South African Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, families in the rural Eastern Cape Province who use the Hippo roller now have enough water for household activities like cleaning, cooking and the irrigation of backyard crops. Men now help fetch the water, after the tradition that women and girls must carry water on their heads was abandoned. Gibbs has big ambitions for the Hippo. He wants to reduce the number of people without access to water by 1 percent. Since, according to U.N. estimates, 1 billion people in the world do not have water on tap, 10,000 hippo rollers would have to be distributed every month for ten years for that goal to be reached. The Hippo Water Roller Project, a commercial company, now distributes about 4, 000 to 5, 000 per year. Gibbs says that in 20 years nobody has been able to come up with a better design, but the hippo water roller only rolls as fast as its funders. At $129 per product, it is not cheap. Corporate sponsors provide 95% of the funding. Transporting the product, manufactured in South Africa, to other parts of the continent is a costly affair, especially to inland destinations. When hippo rollers were delivered overland to a village in South Sudan, the price doubled. Despite these challenges, the hippo water roller has already helped many people. It is but a drop in the ocean when compared to the massive need for easy access to water, but in this case, every roller, like every drop, counts.- Marcelle Balt: Sparknews